High data rate wireless communication systems such as high speed packet access (HSPA) or long-term evolution (LTE) may suffer from severe inter-symbol interference due to multipath propagation in physical transmission channels. A conventional mitigation of this kind of problem in a code division multiple access (CDMA) system such as high speed downlink packet access HSDPA is to use a linear (fractionally) spaced chip-level equalizer in the base-band which is designed according to an optimization criterion of choice like minimum mean square error (MMSE) or maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the equalizer output. The equalization stage is then followed by a despreading stage, a symbol-detection stage and a demodulation stage before channel decoding can take place. The quality of the equalization and symbol detection stage is determining the amount of redundancy which is necessary to decode the transmitted code-word without errors in the channel decoder and, therefore, the achievable throughput in bits per second (bps) on the physical layer.